Marketing and sales is the lifeblood of any business.

I don’t care how good you are at ‘your job’, the thing you do or sell… if you haven’t got a proven marketing strategy or campaign, you’re walking on ice. And you never know when it’s going to crack, and swallow you up.

Over the last 10 years at The Game Changers, I’ve helped hundreds of Australian business owners establish sustainable marketing strategies that have helped their businesses thrive.

Here are my 11 best marketing strategy tips for Australian businesses.

1. The best time to market is when you’re busy

Marketing is essentially an ongoing process of research and development.

When business is booming, you’ve typically got cash in the bank to invest in marketing and research.

When you’ve got the cash, invest in building and testing a sales funnel so that when things dry up (as they will do occasionally), you’ve got that back-up plan to keep your business running, the clients coming in, and the cash flowing.

Think of marketing as building up your ‘brand bank’.

If you’re consistently putting your brand out there and getting followers, recognition, and building awareness, when things slow down you’ve already got the market awareness and buy-in you need to generate sales.

2. Be absolutely clear on who your audience is

Who is your ideal customer? To effectively market your business, it’s absolutely crucial that you know your audience intimately.

Create an avatar document that lays out their fears, their desires, their frustrations, absolutely everything you can to generate a 360 degree picture of who they are.

If you don’t put time and effort into this, you won’t be able to present them with an irresistible offer.

3. Develop an irresistible offer

At the least, your business needs one foot-in-door offer that moves your prospects from being curious about your business, to actively wanting to work with you.

Whether they’ve emailed, called, signed up for a free resource… your business needs a mechanism for moving those leads further down the path.

After you’ve developed your customer avatar, work on fine-tuning an offer that is specific, measurable, and solves a problem for them. The key here is specificity - if your offer is too broad, too vague, or is perceived to be too hard to attain… it won’t stick.

This takes work, but when you hit that sweet spot in your market, that’s when your business will take off like a rocket.

4. Market on one channel at first

Market to one niche, one audience, with one offer. If you’re scatter-gunning your marketing efforts across multiple platforms and channels, you’re going to find it much harder to get a successful result fast.

If you know your audience, and have developed an irresistible offer for them, you’re best off presenting that offer on one channel consistently until you perfect the process. Tweaking your marketing is much easier on one channel than several at once!

5. Test, test, test

Headlines, body copy, images, design, timing…. There are a lot of moving parts within any marketing campaign.

It’s your job to be absolutely certain that your campaign is optimised for the best ROI possible. Otherwise, you’re not necessarily going to be able to replicate, or scale, your campaign. You’ll also be leaving money on the table.

If you could spend $10 to get one lead, or $5 to get one lead, what would you prefer? Don’t be satisfied your ROI is optimised to an inch of its life until you have split tested every element of your campaign.

Important - don’t split test them all at once! That way you’ll never know what part of the campaign brought in the better result.

Change ONE thing for every split test, so you can be sure what’s working (and what’s not).

6. Test print ads online first

If you’re planning on running an ad in a newspaper or magazine, test them online first to make sure they’re actually going to convert.

Print advertising costs significant money.  Don’t throw an untested campaign into the wind and sit around waiting for the phone to ring. You want to be sure that your ad converts before putting your hard cash behind it.

If you put an ad up on Facebook or Instagram, you can find out within 24-48 hours whether it’s actually converting. Do this quick test online before going to print, to be sure your ad will go a lot further.

7. Market your business across multiple platforms

The moment you’ve optimised your campaign across one channel first, it’s time to scale.

Cross-channel advertising allows you to reach more potential clients, and build relationships with them in different ways across different mediums.

Nailed Facebook advertising? Start mastering Instagram, Google Ads, YouTube, Pinterest… there are so many ways to connect with your market online.

8. Educate your audience

A lot of businesses make the mistake of going for the sale too early.

The more that your audience can get to know you before actually signing on the dotted line, the more retention you’ll get, and the easier the sales process is going to be.

Spending time on consistent content marketing pays dividends that aren’t immediately clear, but will solidify your business in the market long-term.

9. The stronger your marketing is, the weaker your sales team is

If you’ve had trouble hiring a high-performance sales team, or getting your team to convert well, it’s possibly because your marketing is weak.

The goal of your marketing is for people to be calling you up, credit card in hand, wanting to work with you. Your marketing should be doing all the ‘pre-selling’ so that the decision to buy is already made - they just need someone to take them through the process.

If your marketing is weak, you’re going to have to spend way too much time, energy, and effort converting them on the phone.

10. Embrace innovation

Once you have a marketing plan in place that’s working, allocate some of your budget to testing new ideas. Just because an idea hasn’t been done before, doesn’t mean it won’t work!

A lot of businesses fall into the trap of trying to rip off other people’s marketing strategies and ad copy. So all the advertisements in the market all start to look and sound the same. This is the kiss of death!

Be the innovator. Do things differently. Stand out. But keep your ‘golden goose’ campaign running so there’s no risk.

11. Spend time learning marketing and sales psychology

It’s not enough anymore to have a good product. If you’re not able to attract buyers through marketing and sales, you’re going to sink. Business has never been more competitive than right now.

Business owners that understand the fundamentals of what makes people buy have a distinct advantage over those who don’t learn how to do it themselves.

It also unlocks a greater ability to serve your clients better. And if you take care of your clients, they will take care of you by coming back to buy again and again.

So there we have it!

I hope this list has been of value to you.